Beauchamp Hall
Summary
Winona Farmington once dreamed of graduating from college, moving to New York City, and pursuing a career in publishing. Then real life got in the way when she left college and returned to her small Michigan hometown to care for her sick mother. Years later, stuck in a dead-end job and an unsatisfying relationship, Winnie has concluded that dreams were meant for others. She consoles herself with binge-watching the British television series that she loves, Beauchamp Hall, enthralled by the sumptuous period drama set on a great Norfolk estate in the 1920s. The rich upstairs-downstairs world brilliantly brought to life by superb actors is the ultimate in escapism.    On the day Winnie is passed over for a long-overdue promotion, she is also betrayed by her boyfriend and her best friend. Heartbroken, she makes the first impulsive decision of her conventional life, which changes everything. She packs her bags and flies to England to see the town where Beauchamp Hall is filmed. The quaint B & B where she stays feels like home. The brother and sister who live in the castle where the show is filmed, rich in titles but poor in cash, are more like long-lost friends than British nobility. And the show itself, with its colorful company and behind-the-scenes affairs, is a drama all its own. Winnieâs world comes alive on the set of the show. What happens next is the stuff of dreams, as Winnie takes the boldest leap of all. Beauchamp Hall reminds us to follow our dreams.... You never know what magic will happen! Â
©2018 Danielle Steel (P)2018 Recorded Books
The Drama of the Gifted Child
Summary
This best-selling book examines childhood trauma and the enduring effects it has on an individual's management of repressed anger and pain. Why are many of the most successful people plagued by feelings of emptiness and alienation? This wise and profound audiobook has provided millions of people with an answer - and has helped them to apply it to their own lives. Far too many of us had to learn as children to hide our own feelings, needs, and memories skillfully in order to meet our parents' expectations and win their "love". Alice Miller writes, "When I used the word 'gifted' in the title, I had in mind neither children who receive high grades in school nor children talented in a special way. I simply meant all of us who have survived an abusive childhood thanks to an ability to adapt even to unspeakable cruelty by becoming numb.... Without this 'gift' offered us by nature, we would not have survived."Â But merely surviving is not enough. The Drama of the Gifted Child helps us to reclaim our life by discovering our own crucial needs and our own truth.
©1997 Basic Books (P)2018 Hachette Audio
The Body Never Lies
Summary
An examination of childhood trauma and its surreptitious, debilitating effects by one of the world's leading psychoanalysts. Never before has world-renowned psychoanalyst Alice Miller examined so persuasively the long-range consequences of childhood abuse on the body. Using the experiences of her patients along with the biographical stories of literary giants such as Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, and Marcel Proust, Miller shows how a child's humiliation, impotence, and bottled rage will manifest itself as adult illness - be it cancer, stroke, or other debilitating diseases. Never one to shy away from controversy, Miller urges society as a whole to jettison its belief in the Fourth Commandment and not to extend forgiveness to parents whose tyrannical childrearing methods have resulted in unhappy, and often ruined, adult lives. In this empowering work, writes Rutgers professor Philip Greven, "[listeners] will learn how to confront the overt and covert traumas of their own childhoods with the enlightened guidance of Alice Miller."
©2005 Alice Miller (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
For Your Own Good
Summary
For Your Own Good, the contemporary classic exploring the serious if not gravely dangerous consequences parental cruelty can bring to bear on children everywhere, is one of the central works by Alice Miller, the celebrated Swiss psychoanalyst. With her typically lucid, strong, and poetic language, Miller investigates the personal stories and case histories of various self-destructive and/or violent individuals to expand on her theories about the long-term effects of abusive child-rearing. Her conclusions - on what sort of parenting can create a drug addict, or a murderer, or a Hitler - offer much insight, and make a good deal of sense, while also straying far from psychoanalytic dogma about human nature, which Miller vehemently rejects. This important study paints a shocking picture of the violent world - indeed, of the ever-more-violent world - that each generation helps to create when traditional upbringing, with its hidden cruelty, is perpetuated. The book also presents listeners with useful solutions in this regard - namely, to re-sensitize the victimized child who has been trapped within the adult, and to unlock the emotional life that has been frozen in repression.
©1980 Suhrkamp Verlag; translation copyright 1983, 1984, 1990, 2002 by Alice Miller; preface copyright 2002 by Alice Miller (P)2017 Tantor
Gods and Monsters
Summary
From the author of The Unrequited comes an unconventional tale of coming of age. He was an artist. She was his muse. To everyone in town, Abel Adams was the devil's spawn, a boy who never should have been born. A monster. To 12-year-old Evie Hart, he was just a boy with golden hair, soft t-shirts and a camera. A boy who loved taking her picture and sneaking her chocolates before dinner. A boy who made her feel special. Despite her family's warnings, she loved him in secret for six years. They met in empty classrooms and kissed in darkened church closets. Until they couldn't. Until the time came to choose between love and family, and Evie chose Abel. Because their love was worth the risk. Their love was the stuff of legend. But the thing about legends is that they are cautionary tales. They are made of choices and mistakes. And for Abel and Evie, the artist and the muse, those mistakes come in the form of lights, camera, sex.
©2018 Saffron A. Kent (P)2018 Oh My Audiobooks
More Miracle than Bird
Summary
For fans of Paula McLainâs The Paris Wife and Amor Towlesâs Rules of Civility, Alice Miller's sweeping debut novel charts the love story of two of literatureâs most fascinating characters: Georgie Hyde-Lees and her husband, W. B. Yeats. On the eve of World War I, 21-year-old Georgie Hyde-Lees - on her own for the first time - is introduced to the acclaimed poet W. B. Yeats at a soirée in London. Although Yeats is famously eccentric and many years her senior, Georgie is drawn to him, and when he extends a cryptic invitation to a secret society, her life is forever changed. A shadow falls over London as zeppelins stalk overhead and bombs bloom against the skyline. Amidst the chaos, Georgie finds purpose tending to injured soldiers in a makeshift hospital, befriending the wounded and heartbroken Lieutenant Pike, who might need more from her than she is able to give. At night with Yeats, she escapes these realities into an even darker world, becoming immersed in The Order, a clandestine society where ritual, magic, and the conjuring of spirits is practiced and pursued. As forces - both of this world and the next - pull Yeats and Georgie closer together and then apart again, Georgie uncovers a secret that threatens to undo it all. In bright, commanding prose debut author Alice Miller illuminates the fascinating and unforgettable courtship of Georgie Hyde-Lees and W. B. Yeats. A sweeping tale of faith and love, lost and found and fought for, More Miracle than Bird ingeniously captures the moments - both large and small - on which the fate of whole lives and countries hinge.
©2020 Alice Miller (P)2020 Recorded Books
Lost on Treasure Island
Summary
When Midwesterner Steve Friedman arrived in Manhattan, the land of the quick and the mean, raring to go and ready to conquer, he soon found pitfalls and pratfalls more numerous and perilous than he had ever imagined. Here is his utterly honest, often hilarious, self-deprecating account of those fateful years, starting with his first job at GQ and his awkward efforts to impress his boss, Art Cooper, and including real and imagined love affairs, disasters at work and play, growing self-awareness with its inevitable bouts of depression and subsequent therapies - all of which fail - and in the end, a wisdom that promises better things to come. In the tradition of Bright Lights, Big City and The Devil Wears Prada, Lost on Treasure Island is a witty rendition of the perils of growing up and being thrown into the real world. With sharp humor and unexpected sincerity, Friedman crafts a inviting portrait of the best of times and the worst of times. For all those who have confronted the endless opportunities of the Big Apple, only to discover how hard it is to succeed in this - or any - big city, this boisterous and often enlightening memoir will prove irresistible.
©2011, 2013 Steve Friedman (P)2013 Audible, Inc.